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EvidenceNOW: Tools and Resources

The Agency for Healthcare and Quality (AHRQ) offers practical, research-based tools and other resources to help a variety of health care origanizations, provider, and others make care safer in all health care settings. AHRQ's evidence-based tools and resources are used by organizations nationwide to improve the quality, safety, effectiveness, and efficiency of health care. Improving health care quality by increasing the capacity of small primary care practices to implement the best clinical evidence is our aim. These tools and resources can be searched by the key drivers and the change strategies of the EvidenceNOW Key Driver Diagram.

Primary care practices can use this Excel dashboard to calculate provider- and practice-level measures of blood pressure control, smoking cessation, and use of aspirin for heart disease as well as graph practice performance over time.

These resources provide the basics tools to accelerate quality improvement (QI) in a primary care practice. They provide a model for improvement processes and tools for setting goals for the practice and testing changes.

This presentation provides guidance on how to prioritize a set of useful measures and create a primary care dashboard. It contains a primary care performance measurement framework, examples of measures and dashboards, and ideas for data sources.

This resource shows how to design reports for quality improvement (QI) purposes, including different types of reports and different ways of generating them from electronic health records (EHRs). It includes checklists for finding data errors.

Primary care practices can use this Excel spreadsheet to create run charts to track their progress in quality improvement (QI). It includes instructions, an example of a cholesterol management measure, and a programmed blank spreadsheet.

This brief resource outlines 10 steps primary care practices can take to partner with community organizations to better support patients with chronic conditions, increasing individuals’ self-management skills.